Occupational Therapist
Waheeda Essop is an occupational therapist who qualified in 1998 at the University of Pretoria. She has worked predominantly in the medico legal field but has always been passionate about paediatrics, in stimulating children to actualise their potential. She has enjoyed conducting interactive workshops for parents and teachers over the years and ran the Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) Centre, a multi-disciplinary therapy centre, in Benoni.
With the pandemic of Covid-19, her medico legal work came to a halt. And in the heart of lockdown, the ECI Store was born. An online store hosting a range of quality developmental toys. It caters for parents, teachers and therapists and also includes interesting blog articles and a customised milestone checklist page with age-appropriate activities
With the ECI Store and her familiarity with therapy tests, ECI then became a distributor for Western Psychological Services, or WPS Publishers in the US. With news of the Tests of Dyslexia release in 2024 and reviewing the test, Waheeda gave her sample TOD battery to a remedial school and other therapists in Johannesburg. With their positive feedback and considering the challenges of dyslexia testing, she decided to host a workshop on Dyslexia, aimed at its acute assessment, diagnosis and intervention. With Dyslexia being multi-facetted, and not a 1-therapist disorder, she chose the topic of a transdisciplinary approach, and hence this workshop was put together!
